On The Thread’s Ask a Bookseller series, we talk to independent booksellers all over the country to find out what books they’re most excited about right now.

School is out (or soon-to-be-out) across Minnesota, and that means it’s time for summer reads! But just because you bring a book to the lake, that doesn’t mean it can’t be smart as well as a fun escape.

To that end, Julia Green of Front Street Books in Alpine, Texas recommends the lighthearted whodunit, “No One Was Supposed to Die at This Wedding” by Catherine Mack.

Readers might recognize this title as the second in Mack’s Vacation Mysteries series, the first being the USA Today bestseller “Every Time I Go On Vacation, Someone Dies,” but Green says you don’t need to have read the first to dive right into the second.

Mystery writer Eleanor Dash is on set to see her best friend Emma star in the movie adaptation of Dash’s first novel, after which the entire cast and crew head to a nearby island to celebrate Emma’s wedding.

There is a storm on its way, and soon they are trapped on the island with a dead body. Of course, the writer of mysteries feels the need to step in to solve the case, as does the method actor who played a policeman on film.

As Green tells it, “There are lots of shenanigans. It’s very funny. It’s silly, but it’s not superficial, and it’s not trivial. It’s a wonderful homage, if a little light-hearted, to Agatha Christie.”

“[The book] has smart characters who don’t make idiotic mistakes. It’s not stressful. And when you pick up this book, you know that you’ve got a few peaceful, really entertaining hours ahead of you. You’re going to sit there and you're going to get sunburned because you're not going to want to get off the beach because you don't want to stop reading!”

On The Thread’s Ask a Bookseller series, we talk to independent booksellers all over the country to find out what books they’re most excited about right now. 

Sarah Jackson of The Book and Cover in Chattanooga, Tenn., says she was immediately hooked and fully delighted by Amal El-Mohtar's fantasy novella, “The River Has Roots.”

Readers may recognize El-Mohtar as the sci-fi and fantasy columnist for the New York Times and as co-author of the award-winning novel “This is How You Lose the Time War.” This book is her solo debut. 

“I love a story that is about sisters, and I love a story that asks questions about belonging, both in terms of physical place--where do we belong? — but also to whom do we belong? Who belongs to us?” says Jackson. 

The two sisters, Esther and Ysabelle, sing to the trees, which filter the magic out of the river. Esther has a relationship with a Fae folk from the kingdom of Faerie, while Ysabelle falls for a mortal who distrusts the wild, untamed Faerie realm.

There are darker elements to the story that reminded Jackson of Grimm tales. It’s a lyrical narrative filled with song and poetry, with a magic system built upon the transformative power of words. 

For another fantasy novel in which language quite literally has power: Ask a Bookseller: ‘Babel’ | MPR News 

On The Thread’s Ask a Bookseller series, we talk to independent booksellers all over the country to find out what books they’re most excited about right now. 

Lori Virelli of Harvey's Tales of Geneva, Ill., has eagerly been awaiting the release this week of Fredrik Backman’s new novel “My Friends.”

The Swedish author of “A Man Called Ove,” the “Beartown” hockey series, “Anxious People” and others offers a new novel about friendship and found family.

Eighteen-year-old Louisa, an aspiring painter without a lot of support in her life, is obsessed with a painting. It’s a famous seascape, but what draws her are three figures sitting on a pier in the distance. Louisa sets out on a journey to find the artist and the people in that painting.

As Louisa crosses paths with people along the way, we learn their backstories. In typical Backman fashion, characters aren’t heroes or villains but complex characters who always have an opportunity to show they can do better next time.

“It’s all about storytelling. Found family. People having a connection through art and through stories,” Virelli says. “And ‘your people’ don’t always look like the people you live next to or work next to. It’s just a lovely, redemptive story of how people find each other.”

On The Thread’s Ask a Bookseller series, we talk to independent booksellers all over the country to find out what books they’re most excited about right now.  

Has Ryan Coogler’s recently released horror film “Sinners” got you in the mood for more vampire books? Ben Mayne of Tattered Cover Book Store in Littleton, Colo., recommends “The Buffalo Hunter Hunter” by Stephen Graham Jones. 

Mayne says the book gives “Interview with a Vampire” vibes. The vampire is a Blackfeet man named Good Stab, and the tale he confesses to a pastor in 1912 is one of revenge. The story shifts between the pastor’s journal entries and a modern reader discovering them.

"Throughout the story, you kind of side with him a little bit, and then you hate him again, and then you kind of realize that he might not be the bad guy in this conversation that they're having,” Mayne says. “It's super emotional, terrifying.

“Steven — he teaches here in Boulder— ties a lot of his Native roots into his storytelling. So he mixes a lot of lore into it and makes his own very creepy, disturbing creature.” 

This is one of the rare cases where works by the same author have been recommended on Ask a Bookseller over our nine-year history. Check out this recommendation from 2021 for more: Ask a Bookseller: A love letter to horror films | MPR News

On The Thread’s Ask a Bookseller series, we talk to independent booksellers all over the country to find out what books they’re most excited about right now. 

Saturday is Independent Bookstore Day. Participating indie bookstores across Minnesota and the country will offer special events or deals.

We celebrate with particular gusto in the Twin Cities metro, where this year, 37 bookstores are participating in the Independent Bookstore Passport created by Rain Taxi.

Pick up your passport and get it stamped at any participating bookstore through Sunday. Each stamp is a future coupon at that store, and with 10 or more stamps, you can unlock additional discounts and chances to win prizes. 

Not sure what to read with all those discounts? Check out the Ask a Bookseller podcast for inspiration. 

This week, Victoria Ford of Comma, a bookshop in Minneapolis, recommends a historical fiction novel with a dose of magical realism. It’s Karen Russell’s “The Antidote.” 

The novel follows five characters living in Nebraska during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Our title character is a prairie witch who calls herself “The Antidote.” Her service? Taking away the painful memories that people wish to forget and storing them for later retrieval, allowing people to go about their lives unburdened by past hurts. The responsibility of memory — and what we lose when we forget — are key themes in the book. 

We also follow a government photographer who comes to take pictures of the Dust Bowl and discovers that her camera can capture images from the past as well as potential futures of the land. Meanwhile, a farmer who came to the U.S. after being driven from his land in Poland struggles with the realization that he is a part of that same crime happening to Native Americans in this country. 

The other characters are the farmer’s niece and ... 

A scarecrow.  

Curious? Me, too. 

Happy Indie Bookstore Day. 

Note: MPR News host Kerri Miller interviewed author Karen Russell for “Big Books & Bold Ideas”; the episode will air May 23.

On The Thread’s Ask a Bookseller series, we talk to independent booksellers all over the country to find out what books they’re most excited about right now. 

We finish up our Books of Hope series with a sweeping novel that interconnects lives across time through a single drop of water. The book is “There Are Rivers in the Sky” by award-winning British-Turkish novelist Elif Shafak.  

Meghan Hayden of River Bend Bookshop in Glastonbury and West Hartford, Conn., says she hasn’t been able to stop thinking about it: 

“It just captivates you from the very start as a raindrop falls on the head of an ancient king of Mesopotamia, and he’s contemplating his vast library. And there’s a particular poem that he has on a blue tablet that is the prize possession in his gigantic library.

And we follow this poem, which is lost to time. We follow this raindrop through other characters, as we move from Victorian England to modern-day Syria and Iran, back to modern-day London. It’s vast and sweeping, but also incredibly intimate. 

The themes of this book are really around the politics of water, water scarcity, how water is both a life giver and an incredibly destructive force, and how we are all intimately connected by water.

You’ll learn a ton about how rivers and oceans work, how water circles the globe, but all in very personal stories of people’s lives who are revolving around two mighty rivers, the River Thames and the River Tigris. 

It really leaves you on a very hopeful note for our own future, as we are reminded that we are all so deeply connected. At this moment, we have an opportunity to look back at our shared history and avoid living some of the same difficult stories over and over.

I felt really inspired by the end of this book.”

— Meghan Hayden 

On The Thread’s Ask a Bookseller series, we talk to independent booksellers all over the country to find out what books they’re most excited about right now. 

When asked for a recommendation for our ongoing Books of Hope series, China Reevers of Country Bookshelf in Bozeman, Mont., turned to a book on her shelf that she’s gifted many times: Cole Arthur Riley’s “Black Liturgies: Prayers, Poems, and Meditations for Staying Human.” 

“I think it is just a beautiful text that is so rich.” 

Reevers, who was raised Catholic but now describes herself as spiritual, describes this genre-blended collection as one that you can read in any order, choosing the selections that speak to and nourish you.

The book includes snippets of poetry from well-known writers as well as Bible selections paired with Riley’s poetry, meditations, and breathing exercises, with room for reflection for readers.

The first half of the book has chapters with universal themes, including love, fear, doubt and hope, while the second half reflects on specific holidays, including Juneteenth and the Christian season of Lent.  

Reevers says Riley writes from their Black queer experience in an open-hearted way that encourages connection. Reevers' favorite chapter right now is about wonder: 

“It starts with snippets of words from Octavia Butler and then Elizabeth Alexander, followed by a letter that the author is writing about what they’re experiencing in their day and finding wonder in the mundane, just watching a grandfather and a child try to find fly a kite.

“And then after that, there is a bit of poetry, and then these different prayers. I think these are all very open to interpretation. There’s prayer for finding beauty in the mundane, a prayer for marveling at your own face, a prayer for stargazing... 

“I think often when reading things, you get to pick and choose. You get to read something that you may not think is completely for you, but you find that it is for you in the bits and pieces that you get to connect with and you get to find grounding in.”

On The Thread’s Ask a Bookseller series, we talk to independent booksellers all over the country to find out what books they’re most excited about right now. 

This week, as our series on books of hope and connection continues, Laynee Wessel with Bliss Books & Bindery in Stillwater, Okla., recommended a memoir about our ties to the natural world. The book is “We Will be Jaguars: A Memoir of My People” by Nemonte Nenquimo and Mitch Anderson. 

Nemonte Nenquimo is a climate activist who lives in the Amazon region in Equador. A leader of the Waorani people, she made the list of TIME’s 100 Most Influential People in 2020.

Her memoir describes her growth as an activist and centers on an international movement by Indigenous nations in the Amazon that succeeded in protecting over half a million acres of rainforest from oil and logging companies. Nenquimo’s co-author is her husband, Mitch Anderson; the two co-founded the nonprofit Amazon Frontlines. 

Wessel recommends the book for fans of “I, Rigoberta Menchú.” She says this memoir, with its poetic translation by Anderson, is narrative in style and rooted in Indigenous oral tradition.

Ask a Bookseller is focusing this season on books of hope and connection. Asked to recommend a book of hope, Beth Rusk of Magers & Quinn Booksellers went straight to the novels of TJ Klune.  

“Under the Whispering Door” is one of her favorites. It’s a cozy fantasy set in a tea shop, which also happens to be a waystation for the dead. When Wallace, a successful lawyer, dies of a heart attack, he tries unsuccessfully to negotiate his way out of what he views as an unpleasant turn of events.

He finds himself at Charon’s Crossing, where its owner Hugo, is tasked with anchoring Wallace to this world until he is ready to go through the Whispering Door to what lies beyond.

Wallace, it turns out, has a lot to learn about how to live, even if he doesn’t get a start until after he’s already died.

What follows is a charming, funny, gentle romance complete with a memorable cast of characters, including Wallace’s punk rock Reaper Mei, who is working her first case; and Hugo’s grandfather and dog — both ghosts, but very full of life. 

“He is one of the best queer science fiction/fantasy writers I've ever read,” said Rusk, who also adds science fiction writer Becky Chambers to that list.  

Klune rose to national attention during the pandemic with his bestselling fantasy novel “House in the Cerulean Sea,” about a health inspector who finds color in his gray, bureaucratic life when he’s assigned to assess an orphanage of particularly powerful magical children.

That novel and its recent sequel “Somewhere Beyond the Sea” also fall under the banner of books that make readers feel hopeful about the world. 

On The Thread’s Ask a Bookseller series, we talk to independent booksellers all over the country to find out what books they’re most excited about right now. 

As we continue our focus on books of hope and connection, Lori Virelli of Harvey’s Tales in Geneva, Ill., wanted to recommend Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s new novel “Dream Count.”

It’s Adichie’s first novel in over 10 years. Virelli called it “a beautifully written book about lovely, flawed characters.”

The novel moves among the points of view of four female protagonists, most of whom have a connection to Nigeria. It’s largely set around Washington, D.C., during the pandemic, at a time that invites the characters to take stock of their lives. Key in the story is the power of female friendships.

Adichie is not one to shy away from hard-hitting events in her novels, which include “Americanah” and “Half of a Yellow Sun.” In “Dream Count,” one of the women experiences an assault. And without giving any more way, Virelli said the events set the table for conversations about privilege and “who is owed justice in the world and who is not.”

“There’s also some lovely themes about just sort of hitting those middle aged years and appreciating the love that you’ve seen in your life.”

As for what qualifies it as a book of hope, Virelli said, “Hopeful for me is not always wrapped up in a pretty little bow. Hopeful for me is seeing depth in relationship and knowing that you have people to count on in your life, and, you know, looking at your own insecurities and how you face the world knowing what you're going into.”